Publisher DTP Crew

This is one of many short video segments which will be added to the Digital Tipping Point (DTP) archive. In this particular segment, Nelson tells us that Diebold was upset with the memos being published on the Internet, because they wanted people to buy their voting machines, and the disclosure of the bugs in the memos threw a monkey wrench in their sales. Diebold admitted in court that they had brought their lawsuits against publishers of the memos as "the quickest way to get the memos off of the Internet." The memos proliferated, though, in part because Nelson encouraged other college students to post the memos, so copies of the memos were appearing as quickly as Diebold was forcing them off of the Internet.

Nelson goes into some detail here about how the Digital Millenium Copyright Act is used as a veto by copyright holders to scare people into removing content from the Internet. He says that Internet Service Providers (ISPs) and the original content providers often wimp out, because they don't want to be sued by multi-billion dollar companies like Diebold. He says that there is a legal loopshole for people who want to wait 10 days or so to put up their content, but that 10 days can be an eternity in Internet time. When something is timely, it needs to be put up right away while the topic is still hot. So Diebold often got to have its way without even having to prove its case in court. It would just give a notice, and people would take down the memos. Fortunately, Nelson had free legal representation from the Electronic Frontier Foundation. But not everyone is so lucky.

tape id = e-dv166_sf_01_pavlosky_004.mpg

The DTP will be many, many films created by the global open source video community about how open source is changing their lives. We, the DTP crew, are submitting this footage for anyone to rip, mix, and burn under the Creative Commons Attribute - ShareAlike license. We welcome edits, transcriptions, graphics, music, and animation contributions to the film. Please send a link for any contributions to Christian Einfeldt at einfeldt at gmail.com.

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Contact Information Christian Einfeldt, einfeldt at g mail dot com